Fire Arms in Iraq

Today I had a really long journey until I reached the university, not only it was the day for the meeting of the National Assembly, but a truck had it's package all over the road, seems like an accident or something, anyway the guys on the truck where simply sitting there, and the package was just small wooden boards, they could have easily moved it out of the road but they simply didn't. Everyday you have to wakeup even earlier than before to make it in time because of such events, you never know what could happen to the road, Americans could block it, an explosion might happen, or just traffic problems. And there is the heat , because in a country where temperature could rise up to 50 Celsius IN THE SHADE, even some cars would heat up, some of the old cars couldn't be driven more than a few hours in the summer, I still remember the problems we usually had with our old car a few years ago, we always carried water with us to cool down the engine in times of need, and when I was first learning how to drive, simply turning it on was a long procedure, you don't need to know what happened when I tried to make it move.

  Ok it has been a while since I last talked about the star of the show, THE AVERAGE IRAQI . Let's talk how does the average Iraqi handle fire arms. A gun is a rare thing to find in Iraq, the most popular weapon is the AK47, which we call "Klashinkoof", a Russian weapon of course. It can be found in almost every house in Iraq, some people carry them in their cars, they usually don't hesitate in using them, I remember seeing some people use them to enter gas stations after the war, which is why there are US troops or national guard at every gas station now, and it is very popular when it comes to terrorists. Weapons are not necessarily used in defense or attack in Iraq, their most frequent use is in weddings, and nation wide happy occasions, how??. Well for example when the Iraqi football team won on the Australian team, almost everybody went to the roof and started shooting in the sky, you could think there was a war out there, choppers stopped flying for a while until things calmed down, this is probably the most dangerous behavior of the average Iraqi, you hear people everywhere saying how it is a bad habit, but there are just too many people out there that think it's alright, guess it will be some time before we can change that. I remember in the first day after the end of the war, US troops weren't accustomed to this behavior, so they would think that there was shooting elsewhere. I've had a few chats with some US marines during my summer field training, which helped very much to improve my accent, and I learned a lot of their ways and habits. One of them was speaking very bad Arabic, but he was learning fast, I helped him a lot. Back to weapons, most of people don't even now how to aim accurately, all they know is how to load it, reload it and fire it.